KathaYantra: The Ghost Is the Story — An Open-Weight Folklore Atlas

Description and use

KathaYantra is a digital folklore archive and interactive atlas that uses open-weight AI to generate answers grounded in verified records, keeping authentic narratives separate from AI‑generated fiction.

Problem

Folklore and urban legends are scattered across oral traditions, archives, and online sources, making it hard to trace their origins, verify cultural context, and avoid model hallucinations.

Outcome

KathaYantra provides a traceable, source-aware folklore archive that mitigates hallucinations by grounding AI responses in retrieved records, while preserving cultural context and distinguishing authentic narratives from AI-generated fiction.

Workflow

• Explore the atlas via the global map
• Enter a country collection and browse folklore and urban legend records
• Open a record to inspect metadata and follow source references
• Ask the Archivist a question to retrieve relevant records and generate a grounded answer
• Compare narratives across records
• Keep AI-generated fiction separate from authentic archive seed records

Evidence

KathaYantra currently organises 300 story records across 15 countries

Source

The retrieval layer uses SQLite FTS5 for lexical search and BM25 ranking to identify relevant records

Source

KathaYantra uses Gemma 2, served locally through Ollama, for its Archivist workflow

Source

Generated fiction carries an explicit marker: "content_origin":"ai_generated_fiction"

Source